When tens of thousands of Americans marched on Washington last month to protest President Obama's ongoing power grab, many liberals dismissed them as a horde of partisan, crypto-racist cranks.

But a new study from a prominent Democratic polling firm shows that the Tea Partiers are neither racist nor particularly partisan. What's more, they genuinely support smaller government -- and they're not going away anytime soon.

Last week, Democracy Corps, founded by Clinton vets James Carville and Stanley Greenberg, reported on a recent series of focus groups they held with GOP base voters and conservative-leaning independents.

Hard-core conservatives in the groups expressed an "apocalyptic" view of Obama's agenda not remotely shared by the swing voters. According to Carville/Greenberg, the Republican base stands "a world apart from the rest of America," and that will make it hard for the GOP leadership to appeal to mainstream voters.

Whether that's true or not, the Democracy Corps report provides valuable insight into what's motivating the Tea Party movement: "Fear of government control is at the heart of virtually all of the concerns raised by these voters about Obama's agenda."

Mr King indicated that high street banks could and should be separate from their risky investment banking wings and calling for a reconsideration of the financial system's structure.

In comments which will be seen as a clarion call for a potential break-up of Britain's banks, the Bank of England Governor warned that the support handed out by the Government had "created possibly the biggest moral hazard in history". He said that it was insufficient to expect that in the future tighter regulations alone would be enough to prevent banks from generating financial crises.

The warning goes against the grain of efforts by Governments on both sides of the Atlantic, which have tacitly ruled out splitting up the biggest banks and opted instead to scrutinise them more actively. Mr King, who said earlier this year that if banks are "too big to fail, then...they are too big," said that there is a risk the financial crisis comes and goes but the current system, in which big banks enjoy an effective guarantee from the state, remains.

Gold bugs are buzzing with excitement. While the dollar continues to tank, the cheers from folks like Peter Schiff get louder.

Ahbay Deshpande portfolio manager with the First Eagle Gold Fund takes a more measured approach to gold. He says talk of $5000 gold – an idea recently promoted by Schiff on Tech Ticker - is probably premature. However, "eventually we'll get there," he says, noting that "as sure as the Federal Reserve will print money and credit that's as sure I am that the value of the dollar will debase."

Deshpande recommends investor put 10% of their wealth in gold bullion as an insurance policy against a myriad of potential financial pitfalls i.e., inflation, recession and currency problems.

Qatar’s oil minister said the debate was ongoing on using the US dollar for oil trade or shifting to a basket of currencies, the official Qatar News Agency reported yesterday.

A long-running debate over the currency used for commodity dealings was raised again by an article that said China, Japan, Russia and France were in secret talks with Gulf Arab states to stop using the dollar for oil trading.

Big oil producers denied it at the time, but dollar weakness has has kept the question of whether it can remain the world’s reserve currency. Producers and oil company executives on Tuesday said the dollar was likely to stay the currency of oil trade and dismissed the speculation of a shift.

“The debate continues also on whether it would be beneficial to rely on the dollar as a currency to sell oil or to search for a basket of currencies,” QNA reported HE Abdullah bin Hamad al-Attiyah, also deputy prime minister, as saying in Italy.

Gulf Arab oil producers do all their oil trade in dollars. On Tuesday, al-Attiyah said he believed oil trade would continue as it was and that introducing another currency or basket would be difficult.

Thursday, October 22, 2009

A Web where Chinese is the dominant language, and connections are so fast that distinctions between audio, video and text are blurred is perhaps just five years away, the head of Google said Wednesday.

"All of these distinctions will completely go away," he said. "We're not trying to design the future. We're trying to invent it along the way ... This is about inventing the future, and we score ourselves based on whether our customers like it."

Reuters

The United States is pumping out liquidity to try to inflate away its debt, leading to the depreciation of the U.S. dollar, Henri Guaino, a top advisor to French President Nicolas Sarkozy said on Tuesday.

He told reporters on the sidelines of a conference of Sarkozy's ruling UMP party that the United States was 'flooding the world with liquidity'.

'Historically, we have only ever got out of such situations with inflation. We can also get out with deflation, but it's much more painful politically, socially,' he said.

'How can we stop the depreciation against the euro, if not by creating euros? The result is that you create inflation.'

But 'if we lose control of inflation and there is hyperinflation, it's a catastrophe for everyone,' he added.

Google, and Microsoft's 5-month-old Bing, each announced deals to access Twitter's store of public data in real time on Wednesday, in the latest sign of escalating competition between the two search engines.

The long-expected deals are expected to ramp up the efficacy and lure of search results, by allowing users to scan real-time Tweets: 140-character stream-of-consciousness messages that Twitter hosts on its popular website.

The back-to-back announcements underscored how real-time data in search results is shaping up to be a pivotal battleground in the search arena.

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Showdown is a series of demonstrations when thousands of Americans - retirees, farmers, workers, homeowners, renters, students, clergy, and small business owners - come together on the streets of Chicago to demand a banking system that puts the American people first and a Congress that makes it happen!

We know that Wall Street has not learned much from the crash it helped instigate. We know that our government, whatever its stated desire to clean up the markets and reform the financial behemoths, lacks the willingness and perhaps the clout to rein in the real power centers. We are not sure if they have been “captured” by them, or just lack the guts to take on institutions and individuals that helped fund their rise to power.

But do we know that, even now, much of our media, despite the sheer volume of coverage may be missing the real story? Do we know that if we want to find missing facts and the real context we have to turn away from the failed media system that never really investigated the failed financial system

The Project on Excellence on Journalism that examines media trends released a study charging “that the gravest economic crisis since the Great Depression has been covered in the media largely from the top down, told primarily from the perspective of the Obama administration and big business, with coverage reflecting the concerns of institutions more than the lives of everyday Americans.”

Why is this? I asked several journalists in making a film and writing a book about the financial crisis as a crime story. A number agreed that the media itself is “embedded” in the culture and narratives of Wall Street, like reporters embedded in Iraq. They lack the ability to be critical of the sources they rely on. They bring little perspective and context to their work.

Two years ago, when he spoke at the Value Investing Congress, David Einhorn said Lehman was in deep trouble. Turned out it was a good call. Today he gave another keynote at the conference in which he argued the policies of the administration have put us on a very dangerous path, one which has encouraged him to buy physical gold as insurance against sovereign default(s).

On Tuesday, March 11th, 2008, somebody — nobody knows who — made one of the craziest bets Wall Street has ever seen. The mystery figure spent $1.7 million on a series of options, gambling that shares in the venerable investment bank Bear Stearns would lose more than half their value in nine days or less. It was madness — "like buying 1.7 million lottery tickets," according to one financial analyst.

But what's even crazier is that the bet paid.

At the close of business that afternoon, Bear Stearns was trading at $62.97. At that point, whoever made the gamble owned the right to sell huge bundles of Bear stock, at $30 and $25, on or before March 20th. In order for the bet to pay, Bear would have to fall harder and faster than any Wall Street brokerage in history.

The very next day, March 12th, Bear went into free fall. By the end of the week, the firm had lost virtually all of its cash and was clinging to promises of state aid; by the weekend, it was being knocked to its knees by the Fed and the Treasury, and forced at the barrel of a shotgun to sell itself to JPMorgan Chase (which had been given $29 billion in public money to marry its hunchbacked new bride) at the humiliating price of … $2 a share. Whoever bought those options on March 11th woke up on the morning of March 17th having made 159 times his money, or roughly $270 million. This trader was either the luckiest guy in the world, the smartest son of a bitch ever or…

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

After dipping its toe in the traditional-advertising water, Google is expanding its "Going Google" campaign to six more countries.

The campaign targets businesses that might be looking to update their productivity software, encouraging companies to switch to Google's cloud-based Google Apps. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company is expanding the campaign beyond the United States into the U.K., France, Canada, Japan, Australia and Singapore, it said Monday.

"We hope our messages – in train stations such as Paddington, La Défense and Shinagawa, and at airports in Singapore, Toronto, Dallas and beyond – help companies, schools and organizations learn all about the benefits of going Google with our enterprise products," Google said in a blog post.

My conclusion: Fed Chairman Bernanke has dumped so much funny money into the U.S. banking system and has done so little to manage how that money is used, the fate of our entire economy has now been cast under a dark shadow of doubt.

This is not conjecture or exaggeration.

Nor are the underlying facts subject to debate.

They are blatant, unambiguous, and fully supported by the Fed’s own data …

A move by CME Group Inc. to allow gold to be used as collateral for margin requirements on all exchange products raises the profile of the metal, but the development probably will not mean a significant increase in demand for physical gold itself, analysts said.

The new global policy became effective Monday in accordance with a member's note issued late Friday, said a CME spokesman in London.

"I guess that would show gold has moved more into an asset class than anybody would have ever thought," said Charles Nedoss, senior account manager and metals analyst with Peak Trading Group.

Sterling Smith, commodity trading advisor and analyst with Country Hedging, called the change a "mild endorsement of gold." And, he said, it might be viewed as effectively another "thump" against the U.S. dollar and paper currencies in general.

However, it won't necessarily mean a fresh influx of demand, observers said.

Monday, October 19, 2009

So you thought easy-money mortgages with little or no down payment for people with bad credit was a thing of the past? Think again.

You can get just such a loan today - and it's guaranteed by the federal government.

Loans insured by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) have become "the new subprime," and these loans are exposing taxpayers to the same kinds of soaring default rates and losses that brought down Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as well as destroyed many banks and the private market for mortgage loans.

While private lenders learned a lesson from the mortgage crisis and are shying away from easy-money loans, the FHA has stepped into the breach. The agency has provided backing for 37 percent of all mortgages used to buy homes this year.

Before the financial crisis, before Goldman was the recipient of billions of Tarp funds, before the financial collapse of September 2008 when even the viability of Goldman was put into question, before the rescue of AIG and their derivative contracts comprising $13 billions that we know about -- that were held by Goldman and whose value had dropped to near zero, for which AIG, with bailout funds from the government, was able to pay Goldman 100 cents on the dollar in counter party settlements -- and before the myriad telephone calls at the height of the crisis between Lloyd Blankfein, Chairman of Goldman Sachs, and Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, ex-Chairman of Goldman Sachs, Goldman Sachs was a tried and true investment bank active in proprietary trading and investments battling away in the world of you win some you lose some with their own money.

And then, at the height of the crisis, financial wizardry reached a new height of magical transformation. "Abracadabra!" The Federal Reserve, in consort with the Treasury, waved their magic wands and Goldman Sachs, almost overnight was magically transformed onto a bank holding company to ensure it had access to varied government lifelines during the heavy weather of what many feared was an incipient financial meltdown. It further sent a crystal clear signal to the world marketplace, that after the collapse of Lehman, that Goldman was too big to fail and the government wouldn't let it happen. At that moment of financial havoc, it was a priceless endorsement.

It’s literally amazing to me that our press corps hasn’t yet managed to draw a distinction between good news on Wall Street for companies like Goldman, and good news in reality.

I watched carefully the reporting of the Dow breaking 10,000 the other day and not anywhere did I see a major news organization include a paragraph of the “On the other hand, so fucking what?” sort, one that might point out that unemployment is still at a staggering high, foreclosures are racing along at a terrifying clip, and real people are struggling more than ever. In fact the dichotomy between the economic health of ordinary people and the traditional “market indicators” is not merely a non-story, it is a sort of taboo — unmentionable in major news coverage.

Zero Hedge recently highlighted the TPG raid on CDOs. This action puts into focus the alarming trend of the undermining of creditor rights. When even the Courts are in on the gang bang, what hope do we have?

The battlefield: CDOs, mortgages, corporate debt The players: hedge funds, management teams, elected officials, lobbyists, unions The weapons: loopholes, new precedents, bankruptcy court, political pressure The Chrysler debacle was stink enough, but the trend of collateral tampering is an outright stench today. Property rights have allowed the U.S. to flourish. They are bedrock of our economy. They facilitate the spread of credit and economic growth that some other countries cannot match.

In Chrysler we saw legal precedent created where a *secured creditor* received less on its contracted collateral than unsecured creditors. In one fell swoop, we saw fiduciaries abscond, “disinterested” advisors incented to rubber-stamp, and the Courts join in on the rubber stamping party (more on this later). Most importantly, we witnessed a government that not only sanctioned this egregious behaviour but astonishingly pushed for it. The Government actually labelled those who filed objections to the deal as “terrorists” (you can’t make this up). The Government actually vetoed Chrysler's offer to give secured creditors additional consideration. Our lawmakers were so involved that Chrysler's own attorneys tried to block discovery of their communications with Washington (the attorney’s clients were Chrysler, not Washington). We must never forget Obama’s alleged threat of using the “White House Press Core” to weaken what little opposition remained (who exactly were the terrorists?).

Sunday, October 18, 2009

Verizon Wireless recently announced that the carrier would soon offer Android phones, and leaks have suggested that the first phone will be the Motorola Droid. Through a marketing campaign, Verizon Wireless now reveals (and confirms) a range of key features of the Motorola Droid here.

First of all, the Motorola Droid will offer a slide-out QWERTY thumbboard, similar to the recently reviewed Motorola CLIQ. However, while the Motorola CLIQ is powered by Android 1.5, the Motorola Droid will be the first phone to be powered by Android 2.0. Some of the new features that Android 2.0 seems to bring to the Motorola Droid includes native sync support for Exchange and Facebook, a new Maps application, a new UI makeover and much more. Boy Genius Report has a nice walkthrough with screenshots of what could be a relatively fresh build of Android 2.0 here.

Saturday, October 17, 2009

Recently China, Russia, Brazil and other nations with large U.S. dollar investments have called for eliminating the dollar's pre-eminent position as the world's reserve currency. This sentiment was supported by a United Nations' panel, and some oil-producing countries have also started moving away from the greenback. The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries is discussing a general retreat from the dollar as the principle currency for international oil commerce.

World Bank President Robert B. Zoellick, a former U.S. Treasury official, has warned that the dollar's place in the global economy cannot be taken for granted. These developments should be of grave concern to U.S. policymakers. Printing the world's currency of choice delivers substantial benefits to America, and losing that status would cause serious harm. Most fundamentally, diminishing the dollar's importance is a threat to American national security.

Currently, the U.S. dollar is the de facto gold standard. Countries around the world value their goods and services, and even their own currencies, in reference to it. In many countries it is still accepted as a form of payment, sometimes to the exclusion of the local currency. In Russia, for instance, homes are often purchased with dollars, both as cash and as mortgage loans. Even many countries find that investors demand they pay their bonds in U.S. dollars instead of the local currency.

Friday, October 16, 2009

California has over 36 million residents. But 60% of the state’s population, over 22 million people, live in the five big counties of the south: Los Angeles, Riverside, San Bernardino, Orange, and San Diego. Given that California (just like the US) has nearly as many vehicles on the road as people, this means that Southern California not only contains roughly 7.00% of the US population, but also 7.00% of our nation’s vehicles. For a region built originally for car commuting between vast tracts of single family homes, 100 dollar oil in 2008 was quite painful. However, as we head towards 80 dollar oil here in 2009 we should consider the economic situation is more fragile than one year ago. And thus, California’s breaking point from high gasoline will now come more quickly.

At this week’s ASPO conference in Denver there was a convergence of thinking that when oil rises above 4.00% of GDP, the US economy starts to falter. An additional problem is that new oil really needs global prices above 70.00, on average, to make it worthwhile to pursue.

Despite concerted government-led and lender-supported efforts to prevent foreclosures, the number of filings hit a record high in the third quarter, according to a report issued Thursday.

"They were the worst three months of all time," said Rick Sharga, spokesman for RealtyTrac, an online marketer of foreclosed homes.

During that time, 937,840 homes received a foreclosure letter -- whether a default notice, auction notice or bank repossession, the RealtyTrac report said. That means one in every 136 U.S. homes were in foreclosure, which is a 5% increase from the second quarter and a 23% jump over the third quarter of 2008.

Nevada continued to be the worst-hit state with one filing for every 23 households. But even tranquil Vermont, where the foreclosure crisis has barely brushed the housing market, saw foreclosure filings jump nearly 170% compared with the third quarter of 2008. Still, that resulted in just one filing for every 5,023 households in the state -- the best record in the country.

It's not often that phone sex lines and Benedictine nuns enter into debates on telecommunications industry regulation, but AT&T Inc. andGoogle Inc. are making it happen.

And even as the two tech titans escalate their sometimes bizarre war of words, a major partnership between the companies is also brewing.

Dallas-based AT&T and Google are squabbling over Google Voice, a program that lets users make free domestic calls on a land line or cellphone.

But soon the feuding companies will be business buddies, as AT&T prepares to offer wireless phones built on Google's Android operating system.

AT&T is ticked that Google is blocking Google Voice calls to rural lines with expensive connection fees, since the Federal Communications Commission requires traditional carriers like AT&T to connect those calls. That means AT&T pays to make those connections and Google doesn't.

Washington’s Blog William K. Black - professor of economics and law, and the senior regulator during the S & L crisis - says that that the government's entire strategy now - as during the S&L crisis - is to cover up how bad things are ("the entire strategy is to keep people from getting the facts").
Indeed, as I have previously documented, 7 out of the 8 giant, money center banks went bankrupt in the 1980's during the "Latin American Crisis", and the government's response was to cover up their insolvency.
Black also says:

There has been no honest examination of the crisis because it would embarrass C.E.O.s and politicians . . .
Instead, the Treasury and the Fed are urging us not to examine the crisis and to believe that all will soon be well.

PhD economist Dean Baker made a similar point, lambasting the Federal Reserve for blowing the bubble, and pointing out that those who caused the disaster are trying to shift the focus as fast as they can:

The current craze in DC policy circles is to create a "systematic risk regulator" to make sure that the country never experiences another economic crisis like the current one. This push is part of a cover-up of what really went wrong and does absolutely nothing to address the underlying problem that led to this financial and economic collapse.

Thursday, October 15, 2009

Google Inc. is launching a new online service for booksellers next year called Google Editions, which will let readers buy books and read them on gadgets ranging from cell phones to possibly e-book devices.

It's the first foray into charging for books for the Mountain View, California-based company, which began its Google Books program in 2004, and will put it in competition with Amazon.com Inc's Kindle reader.

Tom Turvey, head of Google Book Search's publisher partnership program, said the price per book would be set by their publishers and would start with between 400,000 to 600,000 books in the first half of 2010.

"It will be a browser-based access," Turvey said Thursday at the 61st Frankfurt Book Fair. "The way the e-book market will evolve is by accessing the book from anywhere, from an access point of view and also from a geographical point of view."

The books bought from Google, and its partners, would be accessible on any gadget that has a Web browser, including smartphones, netbooks and personal computers and laptops. A book would be accessible offline after the first time it was accessed.

Google will collect 55 percent of the profits, Turvey said, giving a "vast majority" of that to retailers, and the rest will go to the publisher.

Watching Washington policymakers in action, I sometimes think they make mistakes because of unrealistic goals, flawed thinking, blind obedience to party, or dubious information. And sometimes I think they make mistakes because they are—how to put this?—clinically insane.

There is no other way to explain what is going on at the Federal Housing Administration, which provides federal guarantees for home mortgages. Given the collapse in real estate prices, the weak economy, and the epidemic of foreclosures, banks are acting with more caution than before. They now commonly require home buyers to make down payments of 20 percent to qualify for a loan. But the FHA often requires only 3.5 percent.

That's the equivalent of playing pool with a guy named Snake, and it's had two predictable effects. The first is that the agency is insuring about four times as many home loans as it did just three years ago. The other is that the number of FHA-approved borrowers who are not repaying their loans is climbing. Since last year, the default rate has jumped by 76 percent.